First of all, thanks to the caller for calling back - I have now made a sale by phone! I'm a pro. Secondly, NO thanks to the guy who tried thoroughly to defraud me, repeatedly, a lot, and who is now banned for life from ever buying our products. Thirdly, I'm so happy! MOVIES FINALLY SHOW IN THE PROPER COLORS IN SUPREME!!!! Well, they were always the right colors on my computer... hence the difficulty of fixing this bug. But it's fixed! I also wrote the instruction manual for Supreme today, just for gameplay - I'm not looking forward to the horrible day I have to begin the process of cranking out the 700 miles of editor documentation. That editor is a powerful, complex machine, and there's a lot to be said about it. And to top it all off with a cherry, this very computer now has a whole gigabyte of RAM (which didn't blow up the computer when I installed it)! Let's see what happens when I try to render a 3D movie now!

Today I got to take a break and indulge in the luxury of doing dishes. That seems an odd thing to say, and it is. Doing dishes still isn't fun. But you know, it's a break from the constant work. It's a chance to not be in front of the computer for a second or two. That's kinda nice. Still a crappy job. But the best thing of all: finally we have clean dishes for the first time in weeks! With both of us on super-crunch-mode the past couple of weeks, the house has fallen into complete ruin. It'll be so relaxing when this is over, I can't even imagine.

Speaking of relaxing, I'm sitting in my brand new office chair! Wheee!!! The only downside: it's way hotter to sit in than my old skinny purple chair (this is a full on big black "manager's chair" with a back and arms and all), which is a pain in the Temecula summer. But it's comfy, and I now have back support. Nevermind that I'm currently slouched down, practically laying in the chair.

This is an ugly room. Sorry about that. It's the Rubber Room in the Crazy Asylum of Madness, and here Bouapha faces off against the deadly Mr. Crazypants. But what makes this shot so tremendously intriguing is the floor of the Rubber Room. It's rubber! If you look carefully, you'll notice Bouapha's shadow is quite a ways beneath him. That's because he's bounced high up in the air. Rubber is a new type of floor in Supreme, so far used only in this one room. There are much better uses for it though - put a spot of it in front of a river, and Bouapha can run up and use it to hop right over to the other side. I actually created it today, so that's why it's never been featured in any other levels. It's too bad, I think there's fun things to be done with it.

So furthermore, as you can see, I'm supremizing the Asylum. It's actually done now except for one more level. I've got to hurry... the contest deadline draws ever nearer. Mr. Crazypants is one of my favorite new enemies. You really have to see and hear him in action to see why.

I'm sleepy. Fixed tons of little bugs and issues in Supreme today. All last night, from about 8pm until 11:30 this morning, my computer was busily rendering a new animation for Supreme. It's one you get as a reward for something that will take you quite a while to accomplish! Just like it took the computer quite a while to make it. I ordered some more RAM today, I hope that will make future animations less sluggish. I also bought a new office chair!! I'm sad to see the purple chair go, but I'm happy to discover the wonders of back support and comfort. Also sad is the inability to fit the chair under my desk, since this one has arms, so I'm further back than before. But I slid my monitor closer, and I guess things are a-ok! I like having arms on the chair.

In other news, today I received my first attempted phone order. We get 99% online orders, a few mail orders, and very rarely phone orders. But of course, we only just started handling orders ourselves this month, so it's taken until now for someone to call up with a phone order. Well, I didn't expect it... oops... I answered the phone, "Hello?" and got a very confused customer. In the end, she decided I wasn't a legit business (or maybe she just thought I wasn't really the guy who runs the website?) and said she'd call back. Hasn't happened yet, but caller, if you're reading this, see? I TOLD you I was legit!

Ah, probably cost me an order, but it was an experience... and a learning one - I will start answering the phone properly from now on.

Wish I had an edit button implemented for these journal entries... try clicking the IGF link in my previous entry to see why. I in fact am entering the Independent Games Festival, not any sort of women's fund.

It's crunch time here at Hamumu. And I mean REALLY. It's not just me, who is crunching VERY hard on Supreme to have something fabulous ready by Sept 1st to enter the IGF, but also Sol Hunt, who has finally been given a classroom, just a few days before school starts. She's been scrambling to get it set up - and it's her first full-time classroom that's truly her own, and it's her first time teaching 4th grade, and it's a combo class with both 4th and 5th graders! Yesterday, she was doing things for it absolutely solid without a break for over 12 hours. Today's not looking too different as of now!

I don't crunch quite as hard she does, because I'm my boss. Right now I'm off to take a break and play some games. I need that to relax. I have been working nonstop since around 8:30 this morning, and I'll probably be back for more work tonight. But I can't keep that up all the time, it just burns me out. Today was extra tricky - I managed to let the Dr. Lunatic Bundle CDs to run out, and so I had to spend the morning making new ones - and fast, since somebody had already ordered one. So that really cut into my work time. And to make it more interesting, I used up the last of my blank CDs, and emptied my last ink cartridge! So I had to order new stuff, and I hope it arrives before I need to make any more CDs (well, I sorta hope not, since that would mean more sales... I'm torn).

But, all the work is worth it! The new stuff in Supreme is kickin' it old-school straight to the curb and back again with no shoes on. You can now not only upload your high scores, but your entire user profile as well. That means there will be a whole different set of records - for instance "Most chinese food eaten", and "Died the most times". It's gonna be fun. Now I just need to lay off the internet features and get back to supremizing the last remaining worlds.

Looks like the online high scores are working! Sort of. There are some issues I'll have to work out, but it's doing it... it sends them to the website, they show up on the website, you can look them up, up it's all lovely! I'm tempted to put a link so you can see it, but there's just too much dust on the construction site. I don't know if it might break stuff still, or blow up all of Lichtenstein when you mistype a player name. But it's a nice system - you can pick any world from a list box (which is a pretty darn long list box, which will only grow longer...) to see high scores and times for that world, or you can click Top Records to see a page I haven't implemented yet which will tell you who has the absolute highest score, who has the most #1 scores, who is on the scoreboard the most, who has the shortest cumulative time records (question is, since only the top 3 are stored, what do you count for someone who isn't in the top 3? I guess maybe double the 3rd place time or something?), and that sort of thing. There's also a box where you can type in a player name, and see all the scores that player has (since only the top 3 are kept, you're not gonna see that player's top 3 scores on every level, but rather a list of all the levels where that player has scored in the top 3, if you see the difference). Good stuff! I'm excited about it. There's even cute little icons to indicate which character the player used to earn the scores. It also stores what difficulty they were playing on, but so far I don't display that... there's not much need, since your difficulty setting actually modifies your score in a way that will hopefully make things fairish! And if they're not fair, well then use whichever difficulty the guy with the #1 score used, you have access to it too, you know.

I think today I actually wore out my brain. You know how when you exercise, your muscles get tired? That happened to my brain. I spent maybe 7 hours or so flat out hammering on the online high score situation for Supreme. It's incredibly complex, and I have to work on the game code, website code, and a CGI program for the website, all at the same time, to get them interlinked and working together. I haven't actually succeeded yet, but around 3:30 or so, I just suddenly was so tired, I had to take a nap. My brain was worn out.

And of course, the kicker to it all is that it shouldn't be complicated anyway... all I'm trying to do is store high scores and upload them to the web! But there's factors, people. There's factors.

Ow, my tummy. We went to an Indian buffet for lunch. I'm just not good at eating. I do it wrong. My fullness sensors don't work right. I don't know. Ow. Indian food is great, and best of all, as we attempt to be vegetarian(ish), all but about 3 things on their buffet fit right into our diet rules. So eat Indian! I never knew veggies could be so yummy. When I was younger, the only thing I ever ate at Indian restaurants was the awesome rice, tandoori chicken, and of course Naan through the nose (I ate it through my mouth typically, but I was trying to indicate eating a large amount of it - I think I failed and just sounded gross. You be the judge!). Turns out all that other stuff is really good.

Working on the online high score system... it's really turning out to be a bit of a nightmare! Right now it just plain won't connect to the server, even though it's the same exact code I just ripped from Stockboy, which works perfectly. So some more tweaking is in order (even though I already hacked stuff all the way down to the very core of the Supreme code!). Off to tweak.

I'm having fun! I'm trying out out a program called StrokeIt. What it does is make it so that when you draw gestures with the right mouse button held down, things happen. For instance, I drew a W on my desktop to make my web browser pop up! W=web, of course. While on the web, a quick gesture left means Back, right means Forward (how often do you use that? Man, I never do). You have to be careful though - C is close, and Q is quit (no real difference), in any program, and it doesn't ask if you're sure! But whee, it's fun.

I'm also listening to the new Dishwalla CD I got today. It arrived along with the 3 games I recently ordered online. So you can guess today was unproductive. Now let's see what I can get done before I fall asleep!

Hah, I'm being amused by the stupid little thing I just implemented (well, with lots of help from free code on the internet!). See above? It tells you what song I'm currently playing on Winamp. So now you know. I also implemented a basic bad word filter, because I listen to some dirty stuff (not that the lyrics are gonna show up, but sometimes the titles are dirty too). But if you ever wondered what kind of weird stuff I listen to, it shows up here. If I'm not running WinAmp, it will just keep showing the last song played, so don't be concerned if you see me listening to the same song for 14 hours.

What a complete waste of time that was... but I'm always amused by new ways to interact on the web. Now I can't remember what sort of vital Supreme code I was actually looking for help with when I found that stuff. Oh well!

I want to write often, but there's nothing exciting to say. I have finished Supremizing the Icy Mountain, and have now begun the last original world, the Asylum. It too got a major hub facelift - it now is designed to vaguely resemble what you see in the little movie ("Go Away" or "Welcome"), you know, a spooky old asylum on a hill. That's very boxy and odd.

I'm also working on the online high scores at last. That's a task I've been procrastinating on for months, but now I'm finally doing something about it. There's been a crash bug somewhere in the score system for a bunch of months too - my solution so far has been to implement a config file you can use to turn off high scores completely. Not the most elegant plan. So I'll be fixing that somehow during the process of making the online high score system.

After the Asylum is supremized, I still have like 5 or 10 MORE worlds to supremize, though less drastically - all the other add-ons I made. Let's hope I can squeeze all this in before Sept 1st!

I'm still working on Icy Mountain (what can I say, it's the biggest world in the game now! Plus I lost all of yesterday). I came across a situation I couldn't resolve using the existing game features (I wanted to force the player to lose his Mini-Sub that he may or may not have equipped - but just dropping another weapon on him wouldn't work, since the Mini-Sub, like Power Armor, won't switch to other weapons)... so I invented a new special effect to force the player to whichever weapon you want. And that, my friend, is the game developer's prerogative. Something isn't set up to do what you want, you can change it or add more. Hooray! Sorry to you people who are stuck with using the editor as I designed it for my purposes. It's fun to be me though!

Hooray!!! I just finished printing up my first ever DVD case for a game. It's Pumpkin Pop. You see, until last week, we didn't offer Pumpkin Pop on CD, only as a download. But with the new site, I have set every game to be available both on CD and as a download. And suddenly, without the slightest warning, someone ordered Pumpkin Pop on CD! I knew the day would come eventually, but I didn't know it would be so soon. So I had to invent a brand new case design for it right away. Frankly, that's a lot of work. But I did it. And since I plan to move all our games to DVD cases as soon as I run out of jewel cases, there was no point in designing a jewel case for it, so tada, it's in a DVD case.

And holy buckets, DVD cases are SO much easier to make!! None of that fancy back panel folding nonsense. Just one big sheet of paper shoved in the front, and a one-fold manual to put inside. So I'm very happy with this. I'm looking forward to all our games being on DVD, except for the fact that I'll have to redo/modify the artwork on all of them to accomplish it. Especially the manuals, I guess they'll have to be pretty much redone. Maybe I should develop a standard Hamumu manual style, sort of like old Atari games did. Something to consider.

Anyway, if you're the person who ordered Pumpkin Pop: that explains why it's shipping out tomorrow instead of today. I just blew this entire day creating the design... there goes Supreme!

It's so hot. It really is. We avoid using our air conditioner as much as possible, for money reasons and just because we wanna feel like we're tough. But it's sooo hot. Tomorrow could be the breaking point for the A/C... we'll see!

I ordered a pile of video games today. We have an Amazon.Com Visa card, so every time we waste $2500 on things, we get a $25 gift certificate (I think we deserve more, personally). It's depressing just how often we earn one of those. But we do, and we got one today. And every time we get one, we use it up as fast as possible! So we each got a CD, and that used up the $25, but I also decided it was quite necessary to stock up on video games. So I got 3 of them (only one actually from amazon, I am a very serious bargain shopper - the rest were half.com, and the amazon one was from amazon just because people on half.com were charging ridiculous prices for it! SSX Tricky to be specific). I am NOT allowed to play them until Supreme is done. I'm not!

Oops... the feature I added to the site to make it forward people trying to visit some of the old pages that no longer exist (but which are linked to on many places on the web!) turns out to make it impossible to place orders. Yikes. I didn't find that out until about 16 hours after I put it up... many thanks to the guy who emailed me when he couldn't place one! I hope nobody else tried and just gave up. It's scary business running a website sometimes. So now I have ordering working... but I had to lose the forwarding to get it back! So I'll have to work that out sometime. But for the moment, I'm gonna go supremize some levels.

I just deleted a level from Icy Mountain... Deleted it! For good! Brain Freeze was the one. I hope nobody's too offended, but that level was just worthless. A huge waste of time for the player, and a waste of time for me to try to turn it into something fun! Sorry you had to play it the first time. Never fear though, the new Icy Mountain will have TWICE as many levels as the original. Seriously!

I'm feeling quite clever right now, as I take a break from my Supreme work. I've been Supremizing the Icy Mountain. Supremizing means taking the original world and hacking it up to make it have the new stuff from Supreme where appropriate, and adding surprises and things - making it worth replaying in Supreme.

The reason I feel clever is what I've done with this thing. It'll be a fair amount of work, but the new Icy Mountain is a whole new ball of fun. The one thing you'll notice right off the bat is the hub - it's no longer a big flat cold-looking box. Now it's ... prepare yourself... an ICY MOUNTAIN! But it gets much more cool from there. I'll stop and avoid ruining the wondrous surprises that await. I think this one will be really cool, and catch people off-guard as they're working their way through the mountain. Should be good stuff.

I'm adding new junk to all the original worlds (well, that IS the point of supremizing), making sure to include things that are truly new to Supreme - each of them has at least one "racing" level, where you drive a track in your You-Go (a new vehicle in Supreme), each has at least one "stealth" level, where you have to avoid being seen by the evil Death Patrol (and sometimes Boomkins too), and each has something totally unique to it that simply couldn't be done before, ranging from the bonus hidden items to find in the Caves, to the huge monstrous twist that I'm being so sneaky about not mentioning in the Icy Mountain. When I added the "variables" feature to the editor, I didn't really think it would have a whole lot of use, but I've used it in every world so far, in great amounts. In fact, on a couple of occasions, I've almost thought there weren't enough variables available to work with! So, when you read the editor documentation (ugh, not looking forward to writing that), and see what variables are and think "What good is that?", just check out some of the original worlds in the editor (AFTER YOU WIN THEM!) and you'll see.

So, it's been up for half a day now. There were a few scary moments, but things seem to be in the clear now. We've had several orders, which all worked out fine (a big fear of mine was whether the order system would really work... I wrote most of the code myself!), so it would seem we are in business! I'm glad to get this out of the way and cut down my number of full time jobs to two - Supreme and artwork for a friend's game.I sent out the newsletters today, which is always nice. The monthly one was a little late (it's supposed to go out on the first, really), but I wanted to hold it off until the website was up. I just have to say... this is such a relief, to have this thing done and out there. And on top of that, we're now selling everything ourselves, shipping orders ourselves... it's a new era for Hamumu, where we're really taking charge of everything, and stuff is just only getting better! It's great!

Well, the new site is up as of right this second. I'm not announcing it on the newsletter just yet, let's see if we can find all the kinks... so far there's some really wacky graphics on the company page that need fixing, and a broken image in the sneak peeks. Not too terrible! Let's hope that's all that turns out to be broken! Please bear with us as we make the transfer to the new setup. Isn't it awesome!???

The only page we haven't got up yet is the About Us page, which I should have ready by this weekend. So enjoy and explore!

Kind of a lame shot, but it is what I'm currently working on - if you're familiar with the Spooky Forest, then this should be a happy shock to you! This is the hub level of the new and improved Spooky Forest. As you can see, it doesn't all fit on one screen, and there's all kinds of new things you'll just have to see to believe. The original 5 worlds are being heavily overhauled. That green X is the new version of the infamous red X. It's green now.

Whaaa? you say! This doesn't look like Dr. Lunatic! This is an arcade game you can gain access to in the SpisMall. It's pretty darn cool as you can see. It's not really the most compelling gameplay ever, but it's totally mesmerizing to watch the lava flow. This, however, is level 41, which is FAR beyond any level you'd ever see in real play. I just made it start on that level to get a shot of a whole lot of lava. The lava in motion is great, it drips, flows, and sizzles and pops. The tiny little blue tidbit on this screen is the player, shooting a blast of water from his water cannon. It's dousing some lava and creating a little bit of steam. He's hopelessly doomed though. Big time. I can say no more about this game! You will simply have to play it with your hard earned coins!

Notice the timestamp on these entries. 5:30 PM on a Sunday, and I've been working since 9 AM. The things I do for you people!

Just kidding... I do it because otherwise I wouldn't make any money. Hopefully it's entertaining a few people along the way. Speaking of which, Sol Hunt has graced us with a couple new Stupid Comics to inaugurate the new site! Enjoy!

I'm sad - I just had to delete a really cool logo for the home page of the site. It featured the Yeti Bros., Sven and Bjorn, on either side of the word Hamumu Software. But alas, it was too big of a file - modem users would have taken a long time to download it. It's for the best that it's gone, I suppose, because it was also quite big on screen, which made things a little cluttered. I hope the replacement, the simple austere beauty of Hamumu, is nice as well.

It's so hard, because there are just so many ways to do everything, and little tweaks I'd love to try, but it's just overwhelming - I could spend a year on just one page trying different ideas. But you just have to decide what to do and go with it. This site is sort of a mish-mash of that. You'll find different layouts in each section, though they all follow the same basic philosophy. I don't think it's confusing, but hopefully it also provides visual interest, since each tab leads to another set of wacky images. Hope it's not crushing modem users! Just a few more pages to go, and this thing is done!